American Innovations: Stories

ONCE AN EMPIRE

I’m a pretty normal woman, maybe even an extremely normal one. Especially now as I’m entering my mid-thirties, which are among the most normal of years. I live — I used to live, that is — in a small lofted studio apartment on the top floor of a six-story building on a tree-lined block, across the way from an abandoned police station. I bought that studio with an inheritance from, well, it doesn’t matter from whom. I bought it because it was time. My mother no longer tenderized meat with a hammer, I had failed to become the cabaret singer or CEO she once might have become; the termination of our roommatehood had become essential. This was many years ago. I love my apartment so much. Its window looks out onto the Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower building whose enormous lightbulb billboard broadcasts the temperature in Fahrenheit, the time, then the temperature in Celsius, then the time again, then the updated temperature in Fahrenheit, and so on, unto eternity. Having sight of that billboard: it used to make me feel like neither time nor temperature would ever change without first petitioning my approval.

As a normal, stable adult with an ordinary life on a quiet street in a peaceful neighborhood, I never thought I’d be the victim of an especially unusual crime. Or of any crime, really. If it was a crime. A middle school counselor once told me that she didn’t know if as a child, she was, or wasn’t, beaten with a belt one or many times because, she said, we never really know what happened in the past. Only what we dread or long for in the future. And often not even that, she added. OK, sure.

It was a Tuesday when what happened happened.

Every Tuesday night I go and see whatever is playing at the movie theater nearby. I’m not choosy. I’m happy to see whatever everyone else is going to see. That way I stay in touch without having to talk to people, which is great, because even though I very much like people in general, I find most people, in specific, kind of difficult. I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

Like the movie theater. I love the popcorn there, which makes me feel ever so slightly asthmatic. And I love the heavily patterned carpet that recalls the slot machine section of a gas station out West. And that fateful Tuesday evening I saw a movie that was about love. If also about Japan, and kind of about dinnerware, too. The movie ran late, past midnight, which is when — this is what they said in the movie anyhow — the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest.

Its being the witching hour didn’t spook me, I want to be clear about that. One time the Watchtower displayed a static LL: LL, and that spooked me, but little else has ever spooked me. Which is to say, I wasn’t out of sorts that Wednesday morning. (Because now that I think about it, that fateful Tuesday night was actually a Wednesday — as kids we used to call Wednesday hump day — morning.) After that movie I was walking my regular walk home, past the now nineteen months’ static construction site that sits at the corner of my very own block, right next to the abandoned police station.

I turned the corner, past the plywood barrier, on around to the front of the abandoned police station. From there I saw the six stories of my own building. I saw my window. My lights weren’t on. Which was wrong. I always leave the lights on in my apartment, day or night. I’ve never shaken that childhood fear that in the dark things cease to exist. Maybe that is what really happens, if briefly; science these days keeps confirming the strangest things.

My window dark: probably just the coordinated demise of several bulbs, I told myself. Or something. Something pretty normal.

I looked down at my feet, as if to remind myself of them. A breeze blew, carrying an ever so slight scent of burning leaves and an industrial shoreline kind of mildew. I felt myself growing dim through inexposure. Maybe a fuse had blown. A very important fuse.

Some sort of sound. I looked back up, toward my unlit window. Some … thing was emerging from the darkness there. At first, it looked like a nothingness that had acquired an outline on the cheap. But as it descended — it was descending — it became more fully ontologically realized. It was my ironing board.

I’d forgotten that I even had an ironing board. It was an old family thing, all wooden. It used to collapse unannounced, and often. I and a series of dogs had been afraid of it when I was a kid. I’d forgotten it to a closet. I would never have said I cared for it. But when I saw it there on the fire escape, out of its context, a great tenderness unearthed itself, flowing from me to it.

The ironing board’s gangly back legs hooked over the fire escape’s final edge; its front legs made gentle, almost elastic contact with the sidewalk below. Having landed confident as a cat burglar, the board then continued east. Its progress wasn’t awkward or zombielike. It moved supplely, playfully. Kind of like a manatee.

Next, with surprising nimbleness, my brown velveteen recliner climbed down, then passed by me in a stump-legged gallop. My wood-armed Dutch sofa shuffled graceful as a geisha. My desk chair seemed to think it had wheels, which it doesn’t. A green-globed desk lamp went by. An ordinary plastic dustpan. A heavy skillet, scorched. My things. They were all heading east. With an enviable sense of purpose. An old set of Russian nesting dolls from my father, the ladder I used to reach my storage loft, a forgotten feather duster (blue), a pine cabinet with round hinges, two high kitchen stools I had painted, one of which had a yellow splatter from another project, which splatter I liked to run my finger across. My dresser whose drawers squeaked just so, a faux-colonial laundry basket, a blur of white dishes; a checkered ceramic vase, downy throw pillows, three folding chairs, a harem of kitchen utensils; a video projector, a yarny bath mat, a striped shower curtain, perky Tupperware labels, a corkboard with its map pins, chewed-on chopsticks, a crystal-like vase that makes a finger look cut in half if held in just the right way. “Stuff” is such a childish word. Sheets passed as if floral ghosts. My books rustled by like a military of ducks. My mother had never liked my books. She’d said they kept me from real life, by which I think she meant men, or money, or both. Always accusing things of precisely the crimes they haven’t committed.

The parade of my things, I was almost enjoying it. I didn’t hate my life, as it left me.

Then my miniature pink plastic-handled two-tined fork, which has COLORADO ROCKIES engraved on its handle in golden letters and is the surviving half of a souvenir set from a truck stop, and which I’ve had forever and ever: then she went by. Not even among other silverware. On her own. Amid that witching hour crowd of my life, it was she — she who had shared so many bowls of noodles with me, so many scrapings of extra sugar onto plain yogurt, so many steaks cut by another into tiniest bites, she for whom I would refuse as a child to eat my dinner until she was found — it was for her, my fork, that my heart beat wildest. Until the moment of her exodus, I had been too mesmerized even to think of moving. What I watched felt no more personal than that cartoon movie with the brooms, a movie I’d never much liked because it had no words. But my little fork. I wanted to follow her. To beg her to stay or to ask her why she was leaving. Why didn’t I run after her or shout out to her? Why did I feel so limbless? Maybe it was terror; I could barely move. And she — she receded beyond my field of vision, as my old ally the Watchtower did not stutter in telling the time, the temperature, the time again, and the temperature again.

Oh, fork. How does it feel to be a bat? I don’t know. Sleepy, maybe? Hungry? Yearning? Content? I don’t know how I felt that Tuesday night. Or hump day morning. Whatever it was. I barely even know how I didn’t feel. I didn’t feel like reading a newspaper, or having a coffee, or going for a jog, or watching television. Nor did I feel like crying behind the boiler in the basement. Or like trying out for something. I didn’t even feel like I had lost someone I deeply loved; this was different from that. I didn’t feel like going to another movie and asking for extra butter on my popcorn. I didn’t feel like talking to someone who would understand.

I managed the short crawl to the stoop of the familiarly abandoned police station and then rested there. Above me: one flagpoled balustrade where surely, at one time or another, a flag had hung. Had that been twenty-one years ago? One hundred and one? I didn’t know. Maybe no one knew. An old police station. Hadn’t I seen a crime? I smiled, a little. A dew was breaking.

Time had blinked or I had fallen asleep. I saw a few skid marks on the sidewalk, as if from a bicycle. I don’t have a bicycle, I thought. I don’t think I do. Though I have a toolbox with rubber feet. Or had one. The sun washed out the face of the Watchtower’s lightbulb billboard in brightness. Where my window was I could see only reflected light.

Britain, once an empire, now a small island off Europe — that was my thought.

A sound then like the Apocalypse. The superintendent, vacuuming the lobby of my building, with one of the front doors propped open. The super’s name sounds like that of a Roman emperor. Advertus, I think it might be. Or Nero. He knocked on the glass of the unopened front door of the building — but you’re inside, I thought briefly — and waved at me, half friendly-like.

I waved back. Then I beckoned him.

“I’ve forgotten my keys,” I found myself calling out in a childish tone as he crossed the street toward me.

Claudius offered me his enormous paternal hand. After a brief moment of hesitation I realized the hand was to help me stand up, not just to wonder at. “Was there,” I asked as casually as I could, dusting off the back of my skirt, “some kind of electrical blip last night?”

“Something happen?” he asked, laughing, showing teeth.

It is in the nature of a dream that we can’t stub our toe against it. I was told that more than once, by my mother, or maybe by my father. Inside my apartment, which the emperor kindly opened for me, was only my ancient stuffed animal dog, Jasper. Him, and a stray leaf, and a to-do list magneted onto the refrigerator.

“Did you move? Are you moving?”

I shook my head. “This is a surprise,” I said. “I mean, this is terrible.”

“Yes,” he said, and his lonely word echoed against the high ceiling.

I couldn’t tell him what I’d seen the night before. He seemed like a nice guy, but still, I couldn’t tell him.

“I’m sure no harm was meant,” I said, when Nero insisted I file a police report.

“For the other people in the building,” he preached.

He walked me to the station. I knew that if I reported the truth of what I had seen, I’d soon be under the fluorescent light of an intake room at a nearby hospital. Even the most normal person, if placed in a highly abnormal situation, can be mistakenly perceived as the source of the abnormality of the person/circumstance aggregate. I signed a sheet attesting to an inventory of objects. I felt as if I had committed the crime. During the brief interview, I broke into tears, though they may have been fake, I’m not sure. I even said, “I feel so guilty!” A hand went to my back; I was told that people forget to lock their doors all the time, that I shouldn’t feel bad about being trusting. I would be called were anything learned of my objects, or of my objects’ thieves.

I went to eat lunch at a nearby Italian place.

Maggie, one of the waitresses there, knows me as a regular. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.

I’d intended to order spaghetti with meatballs. Maybe my eyes watered because Maggie unprofessionally took the seat across from me and patted my hand.

I told her that my apartment was empty.

“You mean you lost somebody?”

I explained that all my stuff was gone. Not just my TV and stereo and cash, but everything. “Lamps, sweaters, my toothbrush, my backup toothbrush, my ironing board. My favorite fork.”

“What kind of thief takes everything? That’s so weird.”

I shrugged. “Or normal. I don’t know. Who knows about crime, really?”

“Do you have insurance?”

I said yes, though I didn’t know if I did or not.

She gave a little laugh and then pursed her lips, like thinking cartoon style. “Who really loves you?” Maggie asked. “Loves you like crazy. Or like really, really hates you—”

“Besides myself?” I said. “Yeah, no, it’s not like that.” I sipped some water.

“Have you ever broken dishes?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“I mean, out of anger,” she said. “I always wanted to do that.”

“What’s weird,” I ventured, “is my stuff just went and walked out on its own.”

Maggie was lost in thought, in dish-breaking fantasies maybe.

“Just left,” I continued, “like kids running away from home—”

“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “But I have to get back to work. You’ll be OK. I promise.”

I couldn’t refurnish my apartment; I just couldn’t. I decided to rent it out. The first prospective tenant said he was a painter, that he liked the light of my apartment, and then he offered me two hundred dollars less than I was asking. “I can see you’re a person with a rich interior life,” he told me. I suppose he was trying to flatter me as some kind of sponsor of the arts. I’m fine with the arts. But that was not why I agreed to his lower price. I just wanted to cover my property taxes and maintenance fees and have things over and done with.

Myself, I rented a furnished room in a dormitory eleven blocks away. The lessee was a Brooklyn Law School student who was doing something or other in a cold and northern country for a term or two. I could see the Watchtower from the rental room, though I had to lean out the window in order to do so. I went for walks, made smoothies, tried acupuncture, read magazines. I did those things that people do. But the oddness of the furniture crime pressed upon me. Had it changed me? Not that I was so great before, but I had been comfortable with myself, and I had finally escaped an old feeling that I was a failed version of someone — it doesn’t really matter who — else. I knew I was still fundamentally my old reliably me-like version of me. And yet I felt as if the real me were out there somewhere, waiting for my return. I felt wanted by that real me.

Time passed. Not an item of mine — not a lamp a watch a fork a chair an antique ironing board, not a thing — was found at any of the usual fronts where the police, so they said, were accustomed to finding things. I walked back down to the precinct to ask if they had dredged the river. This was misunderstood as a joke. I think this misunderstanding happened because I’m a woman. If I were a man, maybe they would have dredged. Or thought there was something wrong with me for asking.

Though I no longer went to the movies on Tuesdays, some new habits settled in. I, like hundreds or maybe thousands of other people, found myself regularly attending an indoor crafts and antiques market. Some of the merchants there were steady, and some switched in and out. One vendor made exquisite benches out of salvaged wood. Another used old books to make bookshelves. A third sold knit gloves, with the letters for ANGEL stitched onto the fingers of one hand and for DEVIL stitched onto the fingers of the other. Naturally there was also well-packaged jam. Often it was hard to tell who was running any particular stand, as there were no assigned places where vendors stood, and vendors wandered away from their posts, to visit other vendors, I guess, so one (or I at least) was left with the impression that these things had brought themselves out to the market of their own free will.

Of course I hoped my things would turn up. Set themselves out for sale, just like people do, kind of. A normal fantasy, really, given the circumstances. It didn’t happen. Nevertheless, I was often happy there at the market, for spans of time as long as fifteen minutes. I felt like I was thumbing through all the lives I wasn’t leading but might have led. One where I wore dresses that looked like they were made out of doilies and old satin; another where I had a special wood holder for my milk bottles; and a third where I was a typesetter or just collected typesettings. I imagined all the people these objects had owned: short people, and fat people, and people who thought periwinkle was purple, and those who thought of it as blue, and people who blamed their mothers for everything that went wrong in their lives, and people who genuinely liked wearing pearls. Such a crowd.

Each weekend, on my way back from the market to my rented room, I’d pass by an empty lot with three dumpsters on it. The term “dipsy dumpster” then always popped into my head. So I’d think about that term, and then I’d think about how it was a strange term, and I’d wonder where we neighborhood kids had gotten it. Then I’d think about the girl who’d lived across the street from me when I was young, and who had brain damage from being thrown around by an alcoholic dad when she was a baby, and who was beautiful and whose adoptive parents had changed her first name when they got her at age four, and that girl, in addition to saying “dipsy dumpster,” used to say “nekkid” instead of “naked,” which really bothered me, even though we mostly had a great time together. That same little sequence of thoughts ran through my mind each Saturday as I passed those dumpsters. Like a gentle bull within me helplessly charging at the sight of red.

One Saturday — the face of the Watchtower was obscured by fog — as I walked past the dipsy dumpsters, steeled for the predictable memory assault, an unexpected rush of happiness came over me. The happiness arrived earlier than did any perception that might claim responsibility for it. Then, preemptively overjoyed, I noticed my miniature two-tined fork. The pink-handled one. With its slightly melted plastic, and the gold filament mostly missing from the RAD part of COLORADO ROCKIES. It was just there, on a little side table near the first dumpster. My mom had bought that fork for me when we were on a road trip, I was remembering. The fork hadn’t originally been alone; it had been part of a souvenir set that also included a spoon, a spoon that maybe still persisted somewhere. My mother had bought me that tiny silverware the day after we’d seen enormous sequoia trees. She’d liked my hair that day; she’d set it back in two braids so tight that they gave me a kind of languorous headache. It hadn’t been a particularly important day, that fork-buying day. I don’t know why I’d forgotten it or why I was suddenly remembering it. It was just a pretty nice day. We had been pleased with each other. I really loved that fork.

I stepped toward it. I was debating internally whether or not to touch the little fork, to test her reality in that way. Then I saw, near the middle dumpster, among other things, a blue kitchen stool that had a spackle of yellow paint, a spackle that I recognized with horror. Folded neatly over that stool was a pale blue gingham quilt of mine, the one that had nearly smothered me. Turning just a few degrees, I found myself faced down by my old ironing board. My armchair, my striped cardigan, my old yellow toaster …

I heard voices. Two men were carrying my dining table. The taller one, an orange-haired man with black-rimmed glasses and tight dark jeans, seemed to be the one in charge.

“Nope, it’s not my stuff,” he proclaimed. “I’m just helping. She’s bringing her truck round to load up for the day.”

“This is the dipsy dumpster,” I said. The phrase was assailing me.

“There’s good space here”—he gestured widely—“to pull in for loading.”

“She bought this stuff, or she’s selling it?” I asked Tall, in a voice as gentle as I could muster, one that I hoped came across as tenderly demanding.

The lesser man had walked away; he was gesturing to the taller man to join him. “I guess I’m not the person you should talk to,” Tall said with finality, but standing still, as his companion looked on, irritated, waiting. I wanted Tall to choose me over Lesser. “I think this is what didn’t sell, but I really don’t know.”

“Huh.” So they were unwanted, my things. Excellent. Fortunate. I continued to stand still. Tall also stayed still. Did the vendor — She — look like me? I didn’t ask. Very quietly and calmly I asked instead, “Well, what about … well … do you know … the price of that itty-bitty fork over there?”

Two dollars, he said. I asked after the quilt. He said he believed it was handmade by a coterie — he used that term, “coterie”—of older women in a small town in Louisiana. He believed she was asking $160 but thought I could probably get it for $140.

Lies don’t bother me much; that wasn’t the thing. What saddened me was that these things had tried to make it on their own and had failed. I set myself up, alone, on one of the blue kitchen stools and waited for her. Whoever She was. Whatever truck She might be driving. The Watchtower’s face remained obscured, so I don’t know how time passed, or how much of it did. Time can be the ultimate in fickleness, the ultimate in reliability. A white pickup truck did eventually reverse into the lot. A woman, yes, emerged from the driver’s side. She had lusterless blond hair and prominent teeth, and if She had begun to whinny, it wouldn’t have surprised me much. “Disappointed” is not the right word, but it’s neighborly with it.

“You shouldn’t leave your stuff just out here, like old milk cartons,” I chastened.

She didn’t look grateful for the advice.

I pulled out my checkbook.

“I only take cash,” she informed me chewingly.

“I intend to get lots of things.” More if she had more. She couldn’t take a credit card? But surely she’d wait for me while I ran out to an ATM?

“No. Won’t wait.”

“Really?”

“It’s cash now or cry.”

Maybe I should have been kinder upon our initial introduction. Or meaner. “Were you even in the market today? I was there. Aren’t you here to sell things? Aren’t you a seller? I’m a buyer. Isn’t it exactly me that you spend your life hoping to meet?”

“I need to get home,” she said, shrugging. “I live in New Hampshire.”

“No, you don’t.”

She stared at me. “I’ll probably be back next weekend.” A pause then. “I expect I’ll have more quilts.”

I didn’t hate that woman. I really didn’t. Truth be told, I was gaining some much-needed perspective. Distance, it’s sometimes called. She’s a small potato, I was thinking. If I bide my time, if I quietly observe, if I seek the expertise of others, I can find the man behind it all. Wasn’t that the way it was in the movies? You gathered information patiently. You didn’t pounce right away. I walked into the Seventy-eighth Precinct police station with my just reclaimed fork and pale blue blankie in hand.

A man there, at a desk.

Uniforms make me think of people as things, which is by no means necessarily a denigration.

“What was the vendor’s name?”

She was just out by the dumpsters. I didn’t get her name. She had horse teeth.

The man sighed with genuine emotion. It made his chest heave in, and out, then in and out again, more softly. I hadn’t really been looking at him. But that gentle sigh made me notice him. Tall and softly formidable — tubby, I guess — with a buzz cut and a face that seemed very drawable.

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” he murmured without judgment. “Tell me where you live.”

His eyes were beautiful and gray-green. He was, somehow, very real. Maybe the uniform contributed to that. He emanated unarticulated hopes and maybe suffering and fear and maybe a great capacity for love, even an ability to love things he had not yet known for years and years. Mister Pretty, I dubbed him. Mister Real Pretty.

“Miss? I was asking for your home address?” A hint of impatience.

My mom — she would have frowned upon my interest in a police officer. Or been far too excited about it. It struck me that I could offer to take him to bed, to that strange bed in my pretend dorm room rental, in my wrong life. They’ve done studies on these things, and they say that most men happily agree to such offers.

“Do you live near here?” I asked, in turn.

He seemed not to hear that, or able to pretend not to have heard it.

“Do these Wanted posters”—I went on—“ever really solve anything? These people, they all look the same.”

“Can we focus, ma’am? Your address.” I didn’t say anything. “Unfortunately, we’ve got loads to do here, and weekends are understaffed, so if we could get these basics filled out as quickly as—”

But when love is real, there’s no such thing as Time. I wasn’t the criminal, was I? I wasn’t Wanted. Mistakes could be made, though. Misidentifications. But one must be treated with respect regardless. I’ve had so many bad ideas in my life. I needed to be a new woman.

I knew I couldn’t give him my address. Not my former address, and certainly not my current one. It would just make it that much easier to find me. Even if this guy in particular was absolutely trustworthy, an angel. Still, things could get … out of his hands. I had just begun to reclaim my life. I held my fork and quilt closer. I would never give my address out again. At no time and at no temperature. And if they somehow got my new address anyhow, I would keep on moving.

“I’m sorry to have taken your time,” I said to that man, with longing, and anger, and regret, and resolve. “I really am so sorry.”

I stepped back out into the salubrious cold. My mom. I knew where she lived. Or used to live. When had we last spoken? Had we argued? She had never even seen that studio where I had lived so happily for a long time. There were so many things that we had in common. Even owned in common, kind of. She might have advice for me. I wouldn’t necessarily have to take it. I could put my hair in braids. I could stay with her awhile.